


the whole night and the next day together

by ForASecondThereWedWon



Category: Marriage Story (2019)
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Falling In Love, Haircuts, Strangers to Lovers, but mostly just two people having a conversation, not so much 'Charlie and Nicole: the Early Years' as 'Charlie and Nicole: the First 24 Hours', plenty of sex, prequel to the 2019 film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:22:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21814360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon
Summary: I watched it, I was torn, I wrote what I needed to read.FromMarriage Story(2019):"And, um... So, we spent the whole night and the next day together and... I just never left."
Relationships: Charlie/Nicole (Marriage Story)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	the whole night and the next day together

She wears a miniskirt to the play, ridiculously, as if showing too much leg will make them forget the unfortunately iconic flashing scene, the memory of her bared breasts available for revisiting. It’s not a movie anyone buys, but it’s the kind of thing they show on TV from time to time. It’s silly, a little, to have the skirt between her ass and the molded plastic chair of the obscure theatre―more in theory than practice, because, sitting down, the skirt slides up. Worse if she crosses her legs, so she leaves them uncrossed, and because she’s also worn heels that, at home, are appropriate for all functions, and here, just seem to be confusing people, her thighs lift enough that whoever’s on stage can probably see her ill-advised lace underwear too. She wasn’t this aware, in LA, of her inability to dress for an occasion.

During the performance, there’s this _man_. This man on the stage, an actor slash adolescent black bear, who won’t stop looking at her. She doesn’t want him to stop. And she can’t shift, can’t shuffle and rearrange, because she’s afraid now that it’ll distract him, his eyes are so intensely _on her_. She is seen. Somehow, through seeing him, it’s her. His low voice sends a pulse through her skin. He’s a little bit dramatic, or it just feels that way with him never, never looking away from her.

They meet after. Her face is flushed to tilt back to look up at him, though the blood should be draining down from her head, right? He gives her a sideways little smile slipped between the sheaves of shoptalk. Lighting, rehearsals, blocking, oh you’re the director, yes and you’re that actress. Charlie, he says. Nicole. They stand closer, just to cut down on the immense distance between their faces, a product of his height.

He has the absurd idea of giving her his shoes. But that would leave her clomping along the sidewalk and him barefoot like a museum Neanderthal display. Still, he keeps thinking it, hands deep in his pockets, glancing over at her quick dance of a walk beside the stride he’s trying not to rush. You’re ok? I’m fine, she promises, suddenly beaming. Her hair is between her shoulder and her jaw, slightly curled, and it bobs against her face. I forget, he confesses, I don’t notice the distance. I’ve walked back and forth from the theatre so many times. No, she assures him, it feels good to walk. I don’t notice it either. Everything’s above them: the buildings, the dark sky. It’s all up there.

The apartment’s neat, for a man’s, he’s been told. He rubs the side of his nose as she kicks off her shoes in the entryway. He’s ready to eat from the table of her comfort, yearns to kneel and dig his thumbs in behind her ankles until she sighs, that’s the spot. Instead, he tells her to sit and busies himself making tea because, he laughs, he’s a struggling artist and it’s what he’s got. She’s there on his couch―he ducks his head in and out of the kitchen, unable to keep his eyes off of her for more than six seconds―not what he thought.

When she steps in, it catches him off guard. He jumps and she lays an easy hand on his arm. Sorry, sorry, but she’s giggling. He stays standing at the counter, grinning and shaking his head, while she turns and looks around the room. It takes him a long time to assess a room, to figure it out, but her gaze seems to efficiently gather up all its precisions. It’s big, she informs him. It does the job, he allows, passing her a mug. The steam in his face as he takes a first, tentative sip from his wakes him up.

“You cook in here?” she asks earnestly.

He laughs.

“What do you do in yours?”

She casts her eyes around and her mouth is even cute in a pursed, uncertain frown.

“Wash dishes that’ve piled up, when it gets to the point of being a hazard.”

“How do you have dirty dishes if you never cook?”

“Maybe they came with the apartment,” she postulates.

“You live in LA?”

“Mhmm,” she agrees, mumbled into the lip of her mug.

“Maybe they came with the life.”

He sees something real then, as she lowers the mug and smiles, not that she hasn’t been real the entire evening, but this is a flash of something that calms him deep within. There’s something there that could be for him.

“I thought you were the most beautiful person in the room,” he admits quickly. “If that wasn’t obvious.”

He can’t drink the tea now, and he splashes it into the sink, begins ringing the inside of his mug with a soaped sponge. Composed in his state of nervousness, he darts a sideways look at her. She’s simply listening.

“Why is that?” she asks, eyebrows drawing together studiously.

A single sharp laugh leaves him.

“You... You... I was... Because you were,” he decides.

“Well, how would you know? It’s not like you ever looked at anybody else.”

“There was nobody else to see.”

Her eyebrows lift like what he said was an interesting idea she heard on the radio or read in the pages of a book. Ideas hide in him; for her, they live full lives across her face. He dries his hands and she presses into his side.

“What are you doing?”

“Rinsing my mug.”

He frowns as she swirls hot water into the empty vessel. There isn’t any tea left, she drank it all. For some reason, that makes him turn his head to stare at her profile in wonder.

“What?” she asks. She has an anxious shift to her eyes. Habitually, professionally watched.

“You hate to do dishes,” he reminds her.

She laughs explosively, almost doubling over.

“I know,” she gasps, “I know, I hate it.”

He starts laughing too when she’s wiping tears from her eyes with the length of her index finger.

“Do you have a dish towel?”

“Here,” he says, extracting a crisply folded one from a drawer. She gives him a knowing look that completely cleans him out, tears streaming down her straining cheeks.

“For you,” she says, drying the mug. “Understand?”

“For me.” His voice, so deep. Full stop.

“Now, where does it go?”

“I’ll put it away.”

“Charlie.”

She turns and he’s right behind her, reaching forward to pull open a cupboard over the counter. His hand closes around hers, around the mug, but she won’t give it up. She sees the empty space on his shelf and she can’t extend her arm to set the mug in place because her only advantage is keeping it close to her body where she can shelter it and make it hard for him to hold on securely. There’s fight to their tussle and the compromise is the mug going rattling across the surface of the counter. At rest, just not where it’s supposed to be. His arms are still around her and her gaze swoops over his forearms, the sleeves of his sweater shoved up, the shirt folded back over that, to keep his cuffs out of the water. Neat. Her heart beats hard.

“Are you going to do mine too?” In front of her, his arm raises and a long finger points towards his mug on the drying rack. It’s like a puppet show without the puppet on his hand. The skeleton of a puppet, a puppet skinned away.

“I really don’t feel up to it.”

“Too much for a first date,” he says, bracing his hands on the counter, her still between his arms, a tenacious strand of hair twisting the opposite way from all the others at the back of her head.

Her silence is concerning.

“Well,” she says. “Well...”

“Less than a first date,” he amends.

She turns quickly, tilting with her lower back against the counter’s edge. A huff of disagreement from her nose.

“No, more.”

The political space movie that brought her here (and the people considering her for the role, who probably just wanted her to flash her breasts again, but green this time and with some pseudo-social-commentary bullshit reason behind it) is back on the other side of their first kiss. It nearly knocks her off her feet. His lips are large and soft and she clutches his face between both her hands while he pulls her up into him, somehow pressing them together without getting his hips involved, which is unusual in her experience with men, not to be immediately forced to confront an attention-seeking penis. She hopes she didn’t lose too much of her sweet perfume to the dry theatre air.

She’s prepared for the inevitability of being hoisted onto the counter, the bare ass-to-granite contact that’ll slow down her libido but not stop it. It doesn’t come. He cradles her, maybe preposterously―definitely unprecedentedly, hugging her to his warm chest and walking her away from the dreaded counter, the big-enough kitchen, with their mouths hugging too and her toes never touching the floor. She doesn’t know where they are and she doesn’t mind. She’s with him.

“The bedroom,” she acknowledges when he sets her down and she’s jerked his hips forward until his erection is pushed against her.

“This is where we’ve been since I laid eyes on you,” he says. With passion, hands running tenderly up and down her neck, curled over her like an umbrella.

She feels more like a star here than on a set. Tonight’s play―the apartment with the windows and the lights―may have conflated things. She’s dizzy. She’s _happy_.

“So you can see the future.” Her smile teases and her fingers slide his belt from its loops.

“No, that would be terrible.” He pauses to kiss her and it’s surprisingly deep, surprising how deeply she feels it plunge through her like a diver. “I just like to build the best possible world for myself and then try to end up there.”

She tips her head, contemplating that.

“That sounds nice. And in that world... are we naked?”

He laughs.

“You like to get straight to the point.”

“When I can find it.” She looks from one of his eyes to the other. “It was a serious question.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I suppose that, some of the time, yes we are.” With a tidy brusqueness, he tugs her blouse to untuck it from her skirt. “Tonight, most definitely.”

“Then let’s not stray from the script.”

She starts unbuttoning from the top, he from the bottom, then he lifts her again, all the way up this time so her thighs grab his hips and they struggle with her blouse and with getting to his bed, which is really not far away and made to army standards. It’s a question, if he ever served, but she can’t picture it, partly because he was born tonight staring at her. She can tell, when he’s above her and removing his own shirt, the sweater lost at some point, that he wants to hang it up or place it on the back of the chair in the corner (it’s a guess, based on how he looks at the chair in the corner), but she smirks at him and he smirks down at her and shakes the sleeves fiercely from his arms. The shirt is sent adrift, the size of a fucking sheet for a twin bed, forgotten before it settles on the rug.

Getting acquainted with the full musculature of his upper body is going to take awhile; it’s like being presented with a thick book that goes on and on, forward and back, regardless of where you crack it open. She begins by placing her eyes and her gaze on his chest, then caressing outward to the improbable width of his shoulders. She thinks this is his cue to feel around for the fastening of her skirt. Her instincts are off tonight, something inside her is loose, a helium balloon bobbing against the ceiling of a mall food court, or a Wal-Mart. Instead, he falls hungrily on her breasts and she’s ready to apologize as he kisses across the swell of one.

“Everyone’s seen my tits,” she says, her shrug adding _sorry_.

His head snaps up.

“Nobody’s seen your tits,” he pronounces. God, he’s Christopher Plummer, Charlton Heston. Pacino! He looks down again, squirming his knees up the mattress so he doesn’t fall off the end with all his extra inches. Peeling the straps of her bra from her shoulders, he’s reverent at the same time as not making a big deal of it. “Not like this.”

That’s when he surges up to kiss her again, not staring at her boobs. They’re in his hands though, and he’s hard at their high firmness, but he’s hard anyway, so what’s the difference? She is not his perfect creature captured for a delirious night of possession. He wasn’t sick of actresses yet and he knows she _is_ one... There’s an element he can’t sort and move on from. Who is she? Who _is_ she? It’s as though he has amnesia, wrenching the blankets down, shucking his pants, her skirt, nearly getting kneed in the crotch as she kicks her underwear away (he would’ve liked another moment with them, but there is no repeat or rewind or real reason not to go forward, probably forever with her).

“I thought that about you too,” she says as he bounces back over her on his elbows after shoving his boxers away. He thrusts his fingers into her hair and she moans like it’s the most profound sexual fulfillment she’s ever known. It makes him buck his hips automatically and swallow. Her curious eyes open and he probes them, kneading her head with his fingertips. “That you were the most beautiful person in the room.”

“And did _you_ notice anyone else?” he wonders, smiles more to one side of his mouth. Her inner thighs welcome his lowering hips, skimming then seizing.

“Other than you, I was mostly thinking about my underwear.”

“Then I have another thing to tell you that we have in common.”

She laughs in delight and he kisses her neck. The breathiness of her glee transitions into uneven noises of sheer pleasure. His thumb’s on her clit and he’s easing himself inside her, pulse in his groin like this is some kind of Donnesque commingling of blood.

“I thought you were a bear,” she sighs on his withdrawal. Her whole body tries to come with him.

“A bear?” This is baffling and she’s so furiously hot around him. He forgot all about foreplay, except for those moments with her breasts. It drives him crazy when her fingers tickle the crook of his elbows. “A bear?” he repeats.

“Not, like, a literal bear. Oh _Jesus fuck_ ,” she says, and her left leg hooks around his hip.

“So, a man then.”

If they could bottle his voice, they could sell it as lubricant at the drugstore, she thinks. She’s confident about that.

“But also a bear. A beast.”

“A beast.”

“A bear.”

They chant at each other. He lifts her hips while she arches her back, grinding her clit into him. He’s beginning to know the future again, maybe. It’s hard to tell from the outside because he’s quite serene, only he’s _shaking_ and his eyes are closed. Orgasm, she determines, is fast approaching.

He’s vigorous with his hips and he’s covering every bit of her vagina, so it’s not like he’s missing her g-spot. She rocks with him and he bellows, scaring the climax out of her. Then he whispers, “Nicole,” as thrusts as graceful as a dancer’s tapping toes pulse inside her. He bites her cheek, then kisses it. Maybe it’s her doing the pulsing.

“Charlie,” she exhales and he buries his face in her neck like he might winter there. That’s what Northern people do. In places where half the Christmas cards don’t feature Santa in board shorts lofting a coconut drink. She believes.

She wraps her arms around the part of him with the greatest breadth, a place where, in her mind, no one else has thought to hold him, daunted by the difficulty of the stretch, the reluctance to be contained that his powerful body suggests. It isn’t only his words that speak for him. His many, many words, said and acted and recorded, judging by the orderly trio of notebooks aligned on his nightstand; she sees them when she cranes her neck. The man is a furnace on top of her.

Wait. Nightstand. One of those usually features in her encounters, before the predictability of Ben, anyway. _Fuck_. Ben. No. No, she tells herself. No. Ben is numbness and corners and feeling 100 years old.

He’s shared half of her thoughts because he drags himself out of her (it’s good, and terrible, and _good_ ) and heaves a breath that becomes the word, “Condom.”

“Birth control,” she counters.

“Birth control?”

“Yes.”

He thinks, she sees him think, running a hand along the outside of her thigh like it powers his brain. She’s important. A part of this.

“Is there someone?” he asks, meeting her eyes and sending the question from his. One of his hands is so large that it might be possible for him to put the pair of them on her thigh―end to end, fingertips to heel of the hand―and reach both her knee and the top of her hip.

“There is. But there won’t be, going forward.”

“Oh.”

“Because of you, obviously. That’s not blame,” she says quickly, tucking her fingers into the gorge of his spine in the middle of his back. “But, obviously, there won’t be anyone but you.”

“I’m glad you find that obvious.”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes, absolutely.” He gives her his softest smile yet and she longs to put it in her carryon for the flight back to LA. “Nothing’s ever been more so.”

They give in to kissing, an exciting option that’s forgettable when he speaks to her and she listens and replies. Conversation is opening up to her for the first time in her life. It’s the difference between toiling over the letters of the alphabet and, one day, picking up a book and finding you can read it. He keeps her hips against his. To her, this says: confidence. Her understanding of men as relationship and hookup partners, plus movies and whatever, has taught her that men do not like women to be aware of their penis unless it’s rigid with the duty it evolved to execute. This is oddly... trusting. Which takes her in completely.

She strokes her hands up the back of his neck and into his hair.

“Charlie,” she says. Their kisses are placid enough to speak whether his lips are against hers or not. “Do you want a haircut?”

In the bathroom, she stands in the tub and he sits on its edge, in his boxers. It would not be an effort to bring his knees up to the level of his ears. They are outlandish, he thinks. He can’t stop smiling.

“Ok,” she says from behind, ready to attack.

He retrieved the scissors that aren’t for miscellaneous crafting (vision boards, storyboards, dioramas when he’s had too much coffee) and she wields them as an extension of her arm. He enjoys her too much to flinch when they sail into his peripheral, inches from his temple.

“A question before we begin,” he requests, holding up an arresting finger.

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever cut hair before?”

“No, never. Well,” she corrects slowly, “mine, sometimes.”

Although she can’t see his face, he tries not to look worried and nods.

“Well, that’ll be easy then, since our hair is basically the same.”

Without glancing back at her, he feels up her arm to her shoulder, then stretches his fingers to catch the ends of her now more limply curling hair, so much finer than his. Her laugh is a jagged mountain range with a sparkling peak.

“It’ll be fine,” she insists. The scissors wave again. “Unless you want straight-across bangs. I suck at straight-across bangs.” Her hands clap down on his shoulders and she leans around to kiss him quickly on the mouth. She is a jack-in-the-box.

“I cannot possibly overstate how much I do not want straight-across bangs.”

She sighs massively.

“Good. Now, shut up.”

He smiles to himself as she angles his head down and measures out a strand of his hair with her fingers, pulling it taut away from his skull. The first thrilling _snip_.

“Don’t. Be. Scared,” she says carefully, additional cutting noises in between each word.

“Ok,” he mumbles with his chin tucked into his neck.

Getting his hair cut always makes him feel like a child. It’s the primitive act of being taken care of, in a physical, fundamental, quantifiable way. It’s a time when he’s most aware of his height, though he’s sitting, and the tone of his voice, though he’s silent. He can never get away fast enough, escape from the pile of dark hair he leaves behind on the rubber mat. Walking home, down the sidewalk, he shakes his head unreservedly so that no tiny detached hair will cling to him and ride him back to his apartment. Humans are inept shedders, he thinks.

With her, it could be a spa treatment. She’s enthusiastic and so much less anal than he is, but he trusts that she’ll do a good job. It’s calming, actually. Surprisingly. Her fingers plough rows through his too-long hair and he feels lighter though she doesn’t take too much off, doesn’t overdo it.

“I’m getting the hang of this now,” she says. _Now_? Well, that’s good, but she’s already trimmed the whole back of his head. “Tell me about the play.”

He begins with his elevator speech, how he pitched the play when he was questing for a theatre to house it, sending out emails to the right people. She stops him.

“ _Tell_ me about the _play_.”

“Alright.”

The second time around, he speaks of emotions and sleeplessness. The company of actors, his people, and their funny dissatisfactions. While she listens, she rests her bare foot on the lip of the tub at his side and, instinctually, he threads his arm behind her calf and wraps it around to holds onto her knee. This could be something, he thinks, studying their entanglement, imagining her hopping up onto his shoulder, until she adjusts his head and hair swings into his eyes.

“And are you a New Yorker?”

“I am now.”

And then he explains about that. She’s ready to hear him and understand, feels a kinship with the way he speaks about his rightness here. How the city is his neighbourhood and Brooklyn is his living room. How he always wants to walk, never wants to leave. A treadmill life, but one on an incline.

“Your family?” she wonders, climbing out of the tub with high steps like a leggy bird, a flamingo maybe. It wouldn’t be so awkward for her if she wasn’t crouching at the same time, staring fervently at his hair and trying not to lose her place.

He steadies her for his own sake, hands on her back and knees between his spread ones, as he illuminates an outline. It isn’t something he usually talks about. She’s right in his face, the back of the scissors’ blade drawing a cold line on his forehead. He closes his eyes. _Schnick_ , _swoosh_.

“Shake your head,” she instructs, backing off. As he lifts his eyes, she demonstrates, then catches herself and grins.

He copies her, leaning forward and shaking his head until hairs rain down on the tile.

“Face up now.”

She cups his chin in her palm, making him feel adored, and works the scissors deftly around the frame of his face. As she finishes things off, he watches her. After they had sex, she stole into his button-up, and it was and is sexy, but for some reason, she then decided to put his sweater on too. The sweater falls halfway down her thighs, the hem of the shirt hangs lower than that. And suddenly, she became this miniature of him, this top half of a costume of him, like someone else of her stature may come along dragging the legs of his pants beneath their feet. She is a mascot of him and he’s watching, watching himself, which is when he gets the idea of her being in his plays, of himself in two places―directing _and_ acting―of the control, of the freedom. Though he hasn’t been waiting that long, there’s finally her.

When she stands still long enough, trying to tell if she’s done with him, he catches her arm and rolls up her sleeve. She’s been hiking them up the whole time and it’s tremendously proletariat, but he wants to see her California skin.

“The producer,” he rumbles. “You mentioned that you came to the play with a producer. How is that going?”

She tosses her head in oblivious sympathy, wanting to flick his hair away from her face like they’re a mirror of each other. Undetermined is the question of if she should say the thing about her tits, her worries re: her green, politicized tits in space.

“I can’t really tell what’s happening there.” She can make his hair fall a little nicer across his eyebrow. “If they’re showing me off to New York or New York off to me.”

“Neither sounds too bad,” he offers.

“I like it here,” she decides as she says it. “It feels like so many miles from LA, in every way, you know?”

“I don’t. I’ve never really been. Never been,” he edits himself.

“Well, California has a bear on its flag. You’d be right at home.”

He chuckles and looks down at her feet on his bathroom floor. Is it disturbing to be aroused by talk of a bear? Maybe that is the playwright’s curse. If there’s a precedent, Shakespeare set it, and aren’t all creators following Shakespeare? Poor, dead bastard can never rest.

Anyway, it’s taken him right back to the sex and he yearns to be wild with her again.

“Do you ever wish,” she says thoughtfully, more just holding the scissors now than using them, “that your holidays and work trips were separate from the timeline of your regular life?”

“What, like regular life is paused...”

“...and it restarts when you come back to it, like no time has passed,” she completes.

“That’s a very sci-fi question. I think you’re a shoo-in for this space film.”

It’s a joke, maybe a mean joke, but she’s stepping onto his closed toilet seat like Teen Angel returning to heaven, spinning and sitting on the tank lid. He isn’t as trusting of porcelain as she is, obviously.

“That’s how I feel,” she explains, and he realizes his haircut must be over.

“Continue,” he bids, “I’m just going to get the broom.”

While he sweeps, she hacks headlong―bravely, he thinks―into her uncertainties, an inability to fully let go of one thing to take hold of another. She fears being flighty, she craves the right answer, she shines like a star up there on her pedestal of modern plumbing. It would be nice for him if she was always right here. He wants her to hear him and feels the impact when she unravels herself in run-on sentences.

She only interrupts herself when he juts his face close to the mirror to get a sense of himself with this haircut.

“I could’ve done it shorter,” she says, “but I thought it would be better, if you hated it, to leave something for a barber to salvage.”

“I like the way you say ‘barber.’”

“Do they not call them that in New York?”

He’s made her embarrassed and twists instantly away from the mirror.

“They do, it just doesn’t sound as good.”

“Are you saying I have an accent?”

“No.” He smiles and takes her hand, flipping it slowly to trace his index and middle fingers across the inside of her wrist. “You just sound good.”

“ _You_ sound good,” she counters. Her arms cross behind his neck as their mouths meet in a grazing, then grasping kiss. He moans to fill the room as he hauls her up and there’s an involuntary shudder in her shoulders.

“Thank you,” he says when he’s on his mattress, on his back, and they’re stripping her with her knees on either side of his hips. “For the haircut.”

“You made it easy for me.” Her head tips. “I think I know what you’d like.”

“Yes, I’d like it enormously,” he agrees, greedy and poised.

She frowns and slumps a little. With his shirt tugged partway down her arms, she looks like a Sports Illustrated model who’s just been told she can’t pose for shit.

“What do you think I mean?”

“A blowjob. Obviously.” He spreads his hands, his arms, all the way, full wingspan. If this be denied to him, be it denied to all of him. His exposed chest will take the brunt of his disappointment.

“The _boardwalk_ ,” she tells him, and with wicked vindication, positions his length between her legs and rocks over his boxers.

“Sonofabitch,” he groans, stroking the backs of her calves.

“Walking along beside the ocean.” She goes on like she’s a travel agent trying to sell him a vacation, not a woman flinging his shirt across the room and revving herself over his cock. “It’s beautiful, but it’s busy, like here. It might suit you.”

“I’m going TO DIE. _Please_ can we proceed to the sex.”

“Mhmm.”

He tackles her onto her side when she keeps grinding and she goes over shrieking, giggling, kicking. He feels young every day of his life and still, _this_ strikes him as youth. They are dreamers in their twenties and the dreams they dream are a thousand years old each. They can stack them like scoops of ice cream and devour them, lick the runny stuff from the backs of their hands. Her manner of satisfying the desire he thought she’d intended to satiate is something he’ll take to his grave. The disarray of her hair escalates.

His apartment isn’t cold, but slinking between his sheets and up against his warm body―after peeing, after sex―is a comfort food. There was a condom involved this time and that seems to justify everything for her. This is real because of the trappings of responsibility.

“What time is it? It feels early. Maybe late.”

He has to wake up to answer her, she kisses his chest.

“Almost three.” He yawns.

“Do you mind if I sleep here?”

“Please,” he begs, getting an arm around her and pulling her so close that she knows it isn’t just a male, how-do-I-behave-after-sex response. “ _Please_ sleep. If you’re awake any longer, I’m going to have to get up to make more tea.”

She wonders if he really thought that was the other option, sleeping or staying awake but still sharing his bed. An invitation to belong here―that’s what she wants it to be.

“Charlie,” she murmurs, and falls asleep with his shoulder snuggled into the curve of her eye socket.

His morning voice, when they wake up four hours later, is so arousing that they end up embraced, striving and bucking and rolling across the bed until he grips the top edge of the mattress and drives into her until she screams. She’s pretty sure that’s how and why it happens.

“Do you have to be anywhere this morning?”

“At ten,” she gasps, on her back, sweating when it’s over. “But I can call the producer and claim jet lag. The producer, in turn, can bitch to colleagues about the lazy, temperamental actress they can’t remember why they’re courting.”

Abruptly, he’s up on his elbow.

“Then you should go.”

She touches his arm and his gaze moves gently across her face.

“Later. Let them think whatever they want. I don’t fucking care.” Her arm flops across her eyes, then she retracts it. “I’m not holding you up, am I?”

“Not at all.” Boldly, she thinks, he moves over her and unhurriedly kisses her nipples. “The company has a phone tree. I’ll just make a call.”

While he uses his landline―a relic, but he seems like the kind of director, the kind of person, who’s always around, so she assumes he does most of his vital communicating face-to-face―she texts the producer her jet lag excuse. It isn’t very good and she doesn’t really care. Who is she to them? The girl who would draw in the male fans of the tit-flashing film (as if those aren’t the same fans who go to see body-hugging-spacesuit flicks). The girl who would, they’ll be supposing, stand there and take whatever demeaning, patronizing direction they give her, because, obviously, she’s already proved that she’s weak-willed enough to take her top off on-screen. She wants to be wanted, admired even, but not like that.

She showers, then puts her underwear on inside out, the mini skirt, the blouse with the neck unbuttoned. He has cardigans in his dresser, not hanging in his closet, and he guides her arms into one. Last night’s crewneck sweater was clumsy; the cardigan is chicly oversized and she burrows in like a rabbit. While he’s in the bathroom, she attempts to figure out which is making her smell more like him: his soap or his clothing. Seated on the bed as he dresses, conscious yet at ease, she sees him select a forest green t-shirt, jeans an uncomplicated black. Why doesn’t she wear jeans the way he does? Hers are always squeezing and trying to force her underwear up the crack of her ass. She’s never seen anyone look so lovely in a t-shirt and jeans.

“I’m torn,” he confesses, in the doorway of his bedroom with her sitting. He tells her with his hands, holding them out and apart. It’s unbelievable how lithe they are for their size, smoothly in motion. She bets he’d be great at tossing pizza dough. “Normally, I... I’m the sort of person who needs to get up and get out right away.” He exhales a heavy breath and paces a step in either direction, hand gestures precise. “But I want to make you breakfast and, beyond that, I... well, I like you being here.”

“And if you let me out, I’m going to fly away?”

She’s wry, which he finds vastly erotic. His restlessness has nowhere to go but up.

“You _are_ going to fly away. When do you go back to Los Angeles?” he demands, hands landing on his hips.

“Tomorrow.”

“By New York time, that’s only an hour from now!”

“By LA, it’s years. I’ll be in my mid-to-late thirties by the time I’m back. If the space shows still want me, it’ll be to play some wise, old councilwoman. Maybe the 25-year-old main actor’s mother. Even now,” she assures him, “the collagen is draining away.”

“Think scrambled eggs are any good for that?”

“For putting on my face?”

He laughs.

“For eating. Come on,” he says, offering a hand, “we’re having breakfast.”

They break bread across his humble table. The plates match. There are napkins laid. She looks overwhelmed, in the beginning, by his straightforward etiquette. Though he’s a restless man, an active pacer, he enjoys sit-down breakfast immensely, stuffing his long legs below the tabletop, crowding into a wooden chair, and voraciously filling his face. The toddling first steps of their respective careers are a topic of discussion, then before that, the perils of being liked in high school. _Liked_ , not disliked. They discover they’re two of a kind in their gregariousness, making friends easily, ending teenage relationships with no hearts broken. He’d like to ride the subway with her and just make conversation. Any line, sitting or standing. Holding the bar and standing close to her when people shuffle in tight. Talking the length of Manhattan.

She surprises and enthralls him; he lifts a finger to pause her and returns to his bedroom for a notebook, full of ideas. As long as he sits here and stares at her―kinky hair drying, swaddled baby Jesus-like in his oatmeal cardigan―the thoughts will not be lost, but having the notebook on hand is a safety net. He can continue, with it there. Actually writing anything down is unnecessary. All of the beautiful things are her closed eyes when she laughs; the way she impales her eggs several times, stacking them densely on the tines of her fork; the pepper (from the eggs) sticking to her lips because she used the Vaseline in his bathroom for chapstick. _Beautiful_.

He tells her and she covers her mouth, her blushing face, over a big bite of buttered toast. He prefers it fresh, from an artisanal bakery he can barely afford, but he had an emergency loaf (the emergency being a midnight desire to make homemade croutons―it’s happened before) in the freezer and defrosted it. There’s also a new jar of marmalade; she doesn’t want any, but with a lightning-fast twist and pop, she has the lid off, a process which would’ve cost him upwards of ten minutes. He can’t believe it.

“I need to walk,” she finally says.

“Ok.” He grins.

He worries, at first, about her feet, but she straps her heels on cavalierly. She’s enchanted by the quote hanging from his keychain; he kisses her when she looks up.

“I don’t look silly, do I?” she checks when they’re on the sidewalk, patting his sweater down against her body, fluffing her air-dried hair.

“No, but I imagine you could if you wanted to. They’re something very Vaudevillian about you,” he says sincerely, with a smile, gaze going from her head to her feet. “You look like you have good balance. Could fake a tumble.”

“Thanks. I’ve never heard that before. It’s an odd compliment―” They both nod at this, in recognition. “―and I appreciate that. Thank you,” she repeats.

“My pleasure, Nicole.”

Her shoes are better for riding in taxis than walking on chipped cement and, unfortunately, her bravado doesn’t weigh against that, so she stops them at a shoe store where he takes her purchase into grave consideration before helping her decide on grey tennis shoes. The colour goes with her outfit, but the clash against her miniskirt initially feels too one-night-stand-woke-up-late-gotta-buy-groceries to her. _Until_. He tells her it seems Carrie Bradshaw, _intentionally_ Bradshaw, and has strong feelings about identifying as a Samantha. Samantha is his self-diagnosis. Apparently, a friend classified him as a Miranda years before and he watched an entire season of _Sex and the City_ to allow him to make an informed decision for himself. No one was going to tell him who he was, is his point. She doesn’t believe anyone could now, but the thought that he’s always been this formidable makes her... proud of him. She wants to prop her feet up on his reliability after a long day.

Which this is not. None of it feels long enough to her. New York City and the sun has risen! The buildings sparkle, when taller ones aren’t in the way. Their ocean is glass, panes and panes and panes and panes and panes of it. He pulls her to his side to avoid a steaming grate, then keeps her there. The kick she gets when they hold hands is how her circle of actress friends communicate the sensation of snorting coke or getting an eyebrow lift. She could be a New York actress and a Carrie and wear a faux fur coat, riding elevators to the top floor.

“You’re glimmering,” he notes.

“It’s the city,” she tells him. “I’m alive. I’M ALIVE!” And the pigeons fly up like this is a movie.

He shakes his head, tells her it isn’t the city, and kisses her deeply in the crosswalk. Oh god, she’s been head over heels for him since last night.

“I hope you forgive me,” he says afterwards, with them striding along the sidewalk again. Her shoes bang into her side in the bag the news ones came in. “Stopping you in an intersection like that constitutes attempted murder here.”

“It’s ok, I’d rather know right away how your maliciousness presents itself.” She looks up to meet his eye. “Everybody’s a little evil.”

“Are they?” he laughs.

She lifts her eyebrows and lays the truth on him.

“There are no angels on earth, honey, and I’m an atheist, so there are no angels anywhere.”

“Do you like baseball?” he asks, and they go to a game.

She chews small bites with her mouth open, waves her arms around, protects his sweater―placed across her lap and over her knees to make her feel less naked in her skirt―with a haphazard tiling of rough paper napkins. She spends under a minute fixated on the idea of lifting her blouse to see if her breasts can make it onto television as well as film. It’s rage and a threat against no one but her; he’s glad she talks herself out of it before he can.

“And now?” he asks when they leave after the fourth inning.

“Honestly, a nap. Is there a faster way back to your place?”

He has a terrible, fatal fantasy of clapping his hand over her eyes, throwing his front door open, and flinging his hand away to reveal her new apartment. Living with him, of course. It’s madness and he doesn’t do it. He’s antsy about it regardless and takes his own neurotic timeout while she naps on the couch. She’s a beautiful sleeper, soft and quick off the mark.

Her dream sifts LA and New York like oil and water, sunspots in her eyes and shadows under cold glass. Light and darkness scan over her. The former becomes a spotlight―she thinks it’s a shoot, but she can’t move, she’s flat on her back on an icy metal table. A morgue. She rolls away and the velvety dimness is a relief. Her eyes adjust and it isn’t even that dark, the absence of being blinded is the difference. Leaning forward, her elbows encounter the edge of the table she’s sitting at and she lets them rest there. She’s having a meal with him, her placemat is Washington Square Park.

She wakes up feeling out of place. There’s sunshine through the window, but the lights are off in the room. Stepping over her discarded blouse and the miniskirt she shuffled out of before lying down, she peeks into the kitchen, the closet (she’s groggy and turned around) the bathroom, the bedroom, and spots him at his desk. Does he have a hoard of these tiny notebooks somewhere or does he throw them away once they’re full? Delicate is his process of writing, pen held exceedingly intently. It almost makes her feel guilty to have been sleeping. His posture and concentration give the impression of so much work to be done.

“How long did I sleep?”

He jolts, jerks his head around to look at her. She sees his hand pressed over his heart in fright.

“Just under an hour, I think,” he sighs. He goes to tuck his notebook into the breast pocket of his shirt, but there is no breast pocket and it falls into his lap, then bounces to the floor as his legs jump around like they’re going to retrieve it.

“I’ve got it,” she declares, racing in and dropping to her knees. They nearly bump heads and she flips her hair out of her face, laughing, holding up his notebook.

“Thank you.”

She frowns in inquiry.

“What’s in there?”

“Well...”

He plucks at the right shoulder of his t-shirt with his left hand. Is he ready to tell her what she’s inspired? The menagerie that springs from his daydream of her? Dialogue, body language, concepts. But he isn’t sure if any of it’s a play, or another type of material. He’s terrified that he may be writing their life, a joint life, the way it is in his head. There’s potential. There’s potential there, here, down on the floor where she’s still kneeling in his buttoned cardigan.

“I can see your bra,” he observes, peeling the neck of the sweater away from her chest.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I’m sorry, I think I might be too blunt for seduction.”

“You let me worry about that.”

She rises gradually as they kiss, lessening the strain on his neck. Instead of standing, he urges her onto his lap, hands on the small of her back.

“Just thoughts,” he says between kisses, tingling as her hands scoop into his hair and curl tight. “Mmm. It’s a long process between a, a brainwave, and mounting a show.”

“That’s a verb I miss,” she whispers. She bites his lip. “We don’t use that in the non-theatre world.”

“Mounting?”

“Mounting.”

“Hmm.” His sound of contemplation smears into a groan as they push their hips together. He’s never had sex this much. At _one time_. This single, continuous date that he hopes to be on for the foreseeable future. What about the unforeseeable future? He hopes for it then too, even more. The point of wishing for things should be the lack of knowledge of whether he’s actually going to get them. He wants it far beyond his control, doesn’t want to overanalyze or fuck this up.

He stands with her ass in his grip and staggers, puppet-ish. She’s the only one who doesn’t seem to think he’ll drop her. She keeps his face in her hands and tosses him around and around in the kiss, like they’re making out inside a washing machine. He could be a machine, for her―a robot, a ferris wheel, a scrap compactor―with her working the controls.

“You make this easier every time,” he compliments, beginning to undress her, though minus her blouse and skirt, but plus his sweater, she’s only down one item of clothing.

“I could’ve slept nude.”

“You wouldn’t have slept long.”

“You haven’t seen me pissed off. Waking me up for sex might’ve pissed me off,” she warns, smirking as they lie on their sides and she unzips his jeans, plunging her hand in to grip him through his boxers.

It’s a thorough grip too, like taking hold of a golf club. Her fingers roll and adjust on him. He wonders if she plays. Surely there’s plenty of golfing in California, even if he’s always picturing the state as a bleached desert. Barren. All sand trap and no fairway. This woman has been their one resource, and they’ve foolishly allowed her to fly off to New York City to be monopolized in his bed. With an adrenalized rush, he wishes he could fight someone to retain her (with her blessing).

“Really? Would we have argued?” He finishes his sentence and chokes when she decides to go for his naked cock against her palm instead.

“There could’ve been ugly words. Unless you just take things lying down.”

She nudges him onto his back and he laughs at her pun.

“That’s beneath you.”

“And now, so are you,” she points out, about to straddle him in nought but her bra, him with his boxers around mid-thigh.

“Absolutely not.” He stops her, grabbing her knee and tossing her back. “If I had known you were the kind of person who made puns, I never would’ve let you into my apartment.”

“I hate to tell you this, but there’s a lot more to fear living in New York.”

“True. New York actors,” he acknowledges. He thrashes free of his underwear and kisses down her body. Her waist fascinates him. He’d love an hour to get _au fait_ with her curve of her butt. “They’re misery personified, self-deprecating in the extreme. They almost don’t want you to end their misery by hiring them. They just want to go on, smoking the dregs of the same cigarette they’re going to ration to Thanksgiving.”

He presses his face into her skin and sighs. It’s fucking Oedipal. When he licks dainty stripes along her hipbones, down or up, she wriggles. Ticklish.

“You should write a book,” she suggests. “You could, you’re smart.” Off-the-beaten-track theatre critics have plumped columns with his ‘spark of genius,’ but he’s never been called smart before. It’s kind of, well, it’s touching, and she’s not making him thank her for it. “A book to help other people avoid encountering New York actors in New York.”

“Anywhere, really,” he adds on, kissing across her abdomen. “If they’re insufferable on home turf, they must be fucking caricaturish anyplace else.”

“Back up here for a minute. I need you.” Wrenchingly matter-of-fact.

He rises and she draws him down not for his lips, but his throat, collarbone, and the tight line stretching to his shoulders.

“How are LA actors?” he asks. She changes her mind and ravages his mouth for a minute. It almost goes completely to hell from there, the two of them entwining with ferocity, her going zero-to-sixty on a shriek into his mouth with the bodice-ripper way he takes her in his arms.

“The worst,” she gasps as he kisses rapidly back down her sternum.

“What about you?” He removes her bra, sucks hard on each of her nipples, and really believes she would’ve flipped him onto his back by now if she had a sporting, or even unsporting, chance in the weight department. He is his sturdy presence.

“Shit!” Her nails bite like cats at the back of his neck. “Review myself?”

The appeal scares her more than most things. She’ll do it though. She doesn’t want him to excuse her. He ventures lower, straight down between her thighs. He shifts her feet, one at a time, forward to make her knees fold up. He’s aggressive with his tongue and she pants. Her pitch runs all over the place during her self-evaluation.

“I’m punctual. I’m worse at laughing than crying. People like my hands but hate my wrists, but I guess that’s an outside preference. I still get along with most people, even other actors. I’m not a diva. I have trouble relaxing, um, sometimes, in front of the camera.” She hisses a breath as he focuses on her clit, and twirls a finger in her hair to distract herself enough to keep talking. “I don’t stand up for myself. I’m always professional. Badly placed props irritate me, not that I ever say anything because―AH―” Her hand smoothes over the back of his head. “―I don’t like to rock the boat. I’m easy to market. I always say the right things, know when to smile and when to squint in a way that I’ve had the displeasure of been told reminds men of their earliest dominatrix fantasies. My posture’s strong. I didn’t have dance lessons as a child, which turned out to be a big mistake going into acting, up against people who would pull a waltz or some kind of acrobatic contemporary shit out of their back pocket, so I’ve been taking classes as an adult. Related to that, I have excellent inner ears, rarely get dizzy, never carsick. I adapt easily to other people’s schedules. To their needs, I guess. Ah, _AH_! God _damn_ it, Charlie, right there!” He slings her twitching leg over his shoulder and bears down mercilessly with his tongue.

She orgasms and he’s slow to leave her, finally lugging himself up and falling at her side, making her bounce. She slaps a hand to her chest, breathing hard and staring at his creamy white ceiling. Probably touches it up himself.

“The truth is,” she pants, “I need direction.”

He turns his head, then rolls over onto his side, supporting his cheek with his fist.

“You sound perfect. I wish everyone, _any_ one, I work with knew themselves that well. You’re probably wrong about half of it anyway. Do you find that you’re hard on yourself, in general?”

After an initial hum of contemplation, she takes her time, rolling to face him when she can. He pulls her legs towards him with his own and weaves them together, tangled from their knees down. She’s happiest barefoot.

“Do you think you’ll get everything you want?”

He snorts.

“I’m sorry,” she says unapologetically, but not hostilely. “I thought we were asking difficult questions.”

“I’m willing to strike mine if you do the same,” he offers, laying an exploratory hand on her stomach.

This has to be the last time. Again, they’re kissing and it’s riotous. The condom’s in play. His bed’s coverings look as though they’ve been swept to and fro by the tide. In terms of their affection, the tide is always coming in. He’s grabby, won’t let her go and it feels divine― _literally_ divine; she has a sense of being strapped into a celestial slingshot and fired up among the stars. What would he have done without her? Last night, today. What will he _do_? Cook eggs and walk with his hands in his pockets. Perpetually charismatic, waiting to be waved forward on the stage and thanked. Their egos would clash, but they would be so stalwart together. She could do with a love like that because she’s feeling younger every hour and it’s not just the exercise and it’s not just the stadium junk food and it’s not the ageless sage (as in colour, because wisdom is worse than innocence) face of the Statue of Liberty. She likes his nose and how she can rest hers alongside it as they breathe shared air, him sitting with his back against the wall and her rocking with his thumbs squashed into the fleshy round of her hips.

“You should join us. Me,” he says, resting his head back and swallowing. He even sweats neatly, an orderly trickle at his hairline. “The company.”

Her gaze skips between his eyes.

“Are you trying to hire me?”

“Hiring, flat-out.” He groans when she widens her thighs and shoves her hips tighter to his to grind her clit against him. “Consider it an offer.”

“That’s not what I―unnh,” she breaks off, riding him faster. She grips as much of his upper arms as she can with both hands. “You know I’m going back to LA.”

The desperation of the act is contagious and thoughts whiz past in his mind, of short naps, long walks, and not losing her.

“Don’t,” he pleads. He takes a hand off her hip to cradle the back of her head, thumb tracing along the underside of her jaw. “Please don’t, Nicole.”

“I―”

“There isn’t any more to this than me telling you that I need you to stay. Don’t pretend.” Clenching the muscles of his legs and abdomen, he thumps up and down, thrusting inside her.

“There’s a lot more to it! My family’s in LA, my clothes, my stuff―”

“Oh good,” he grins before scrunching his mouth as he slouches, searching for a more sustainable angle. “We’re already on the practicalities.”

“―my work!”

“But that could be here!”

“You’ve never seen me act, I don’t think.”

“I’ve seen you move. I’ve heard you speak. Acting’s only an extension, sweetheart.”

“Are you sure you don’t just want to win?!” she cries, exasperated and so close she could put her head through a wall.

“If I want to win, it’s because it’s the right thing for you. I’m not short on actors.”

“I have the producer.”

“I never said you didn’t!” They’re heaving against one another. He can’t keep his eyes open. “I’m giving you an option.”

“You’re asking me to c-change my entire life.”

“I’m only asking before someone else can. I need you. Not just for your work,” he babbles on, hands roaming her hot back. “You know that.”

He doesn’t know if he gets her off or she does it herself, scratching her own itch, but they hug each other unforgivingly as he hacks a sob into her hair, then she quakes in his arms.

She went lipstick-heavy last night (obviously that’s long gone), just mascara for her eyes, and some of those flakes must not have been washed away with her shower this morning. Something’s prickling her eyes. For a moment, after he sinks down with her and she struggles―like a puppy―to right herself, she feels exhausted enough to fold herself square and flat and slip inside a pizza box.

“Can you tell me?” he whispers. With one finger, he tucks hair behind her ear.

“What do you want to hear? For real.”

“What do you want to say?”

He’s goal-oriented in a way that doesn’t mix with manipulation, so his questions don’t feel coercive. Corrosive, maybe, because her time with him has eaten its way through her. There may be holes, there could be burns, but there’s something new underneath, and it isn’t raw. It’s gaining sensation all the time.

“I need to think about it,” she says to feel conscientious.

“I can see you here,” he says softly, taking her hand and pulling up just the sheet. “Nicole, close your eyes.”

He checks that she has, lifting his neck from the bed to verify she isn’t peeking from the other eye. Her body language isn’t peaceful. It’s prepared for something though.

“I see you with the company, laughing and having late dinners with bloodshot eyes.”

Closing his own eyes, he enters his imagination. He breathes only through his nose. You drink wine, I think, he tells her. It’s sophisticated, but that isn’t why you choose it. There’s something friendly about the glass in your hand, sparkling when you lean across the table to hear a tale of someone’s bad date. They’re good people and I can’t say for sure whether you’ll accept them faster than they accept you. Your work can be important, and you’ll be important for what I do. It’s nice to matter, she says. That’ll be your way of life, he promises. The work will feel so... so _big_ that hearing your name said out on the street will be inconsequential, but it’ll happen. You and I... fall in love, he narrates, obviously. Obviously, she agrees. Sooner rather than later. But who wants to wait for later? Inevitably, he goes on, you’ll cut your hair. Will I? she wonders. I don’t put stock in reinvention, just momentum. You’ll get there, he says, I can see it. Everyone will want to be us, which will make us both extremely uncomfortable. In any case, it sells tickets, we win awards. Do you see it? Yes, she says. We go all the way, he emphasizes. Actors want to join our prestigious company. We’re flooded with headshots. We hire an intern _just_ to deal with the headshots. Sometime, when we can live anywhere, we sit around and rub the autograph cramps out of our hands and we think of our first apartment. This one? she asks. Or another, he says easily. I want you to have your say. We think of ourselves there, or here, or whatever, and we wonder if those versions of us knew. Then we remember, of course, that we did know, we do know, right now, and that it started with me getting off my ass and showing up early to my night rehearsal and you keeping the dinner you have scheduled with that producer, but breaking the news that you won’t be available. I’d love to see you turn someone down, by the way. Probably the kindest thing in the world. But you’ll do it and they won’t mind, because of your thoughtfulness. What will I say exactly? she asks. I can’t hear your words, he admits, but I can see your face. You smile and they’re enchanted, maybe they think you’re risking your career switching from movies to theatre, and you don’t care. You’re alive.

That’s what I have so far, he says.

I think, she replies, it’s a very good story.


End file.
